


Learning Curve

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII Series, Final Fantasy XIII-2
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Developing Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-09 23:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11115027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: “I can serenade you with a seminar on the anomalous minutiae of the inter-dimensional matter spread between space-times.”Noel snorted in laughter. He’d said it so matter-of-factly that Noel thought for sure that it must have been a joke... It was somehow even funnier that Hope was completely serious.





	Learning Curve

Hope made him feel like an outsider. Not because the man alienated Noel in any way. In fact, he’d been nothing but hospitable since sheltering him and Serah under the canopies of his research site. But watching him talk with Serah, cluster into her orbit like a re-entering satellite, previously lost to the vast cosmos of space… Noel felt abruptly disconnected from his place. Both as an ally and in time.

In a way, he was almost grateful for it. He’d been growing too comfortable in his new role. Almost complacent, in spite of the anomalous horrors he and Serah battled throughout the disjointed days since they’d first met. Standing at a distance, watching Hope and Serah smile over the recollections of a mutual history reminded him that this wasn’t his world. These weren’t the people he’d set out to save.

He’d first seen Hope as a stranger. A stranger that saved their lives. But Noel quickly remembered that Hope wasn’t the stranger here. He withdrew to the outskirts of the little dens while Hope and Serah reminisced. He crossed his arms and leaned on the ancient, crumbled columns the scientists built their refuges between. He watched the people scurry between canvased tents atop a mossy stone plaza – more people than Noel had ever seen.

He watched the unseen connections between each of them. Eyes catching across distant space. Calling without words for one to cross over and join them. Immediately falling into step with colleagues without being told which direction they were going. Witty curls of lips and the resounding snorts of laughter. Causes and effects. The intimacy of mere gestures, some never touching, yet still so profound.

An absent wave: “come here, come here.” A hand over lips and waves of warmth between two flirts. He could see it like heat over the desert. He could see the value in the smallest things. Things that he watched these long-dead phantoms take for granted. His nails dug into the skin of his arms. He envied them. _So many of them._ The people he’d known had been gone too soon to forge these types of connections. Sooner than the people he watched would be gone.

“Hey.”

Noel glanced to the side. His brow furrowed when he didn’t find Serah tacked onto Hope’s side. He turned his head around the corner to peer into the head scientist’s alcove. Felt the corners of his lips twitch at the sight of Serah folded asleep onto her side on the make-shift love-seat in the corner, with a threadbare blanket lovingly tucked around her and a bobbing Moogle, floating as a dream sentinel, over the girl’s head.

“I think I might have bored her to sleep,” Hope chuckled. “Went a little too far down the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics.”

“Bored might be too harsh of a word,” Noel said.

It had been a long few days, struggling through the Massif. Even with all of time sprawled out in front of them, it never felt like they had enough of it to spare. They were racing after threads that they could barely even see. Barely understood. And the displacement of time was difficult to acclimate to. There was no clock to sync their own to. Hard to know when to sleep or where. The fatigue caught up to them in crashes.

“Shouldn’t you try resting, too?” Hope asked.

Noel shrugged. He didn’t think he could if he tried. The site was still unfamiliar territory for him. They’d come in and out of it for a few days – or maybe years, from the perspective of the people who worked there. He knew that Serah trusted Hope, but Noel didn’t know him. Didn’t know any of them. Didn’t know the territory, the borders, or the security of the site. It had often been his task to guard the boundaries of camp when Caius was gone. He was used to mistrusting the fringes of safety, searching for intrusions, and keeping his eyes as alert as his blades.

“I can serenade you with a seminar on the anomalous minutiae of the inter-dimensional matter spread between space-times.”

Noel snorted in laughter. He’d said it so matter-of-factly that Noel thought for sure that it must have been a joke. The expectant stare he got back forced his lips into a thin line to keep himself from laughing out loud. It was somehow even funnier that Hope was completely serious.

“I’ll find my lullabies elsewhere, thanks though,” he declined instead.

Hope nodded, eyes skittering to the side. He paced a few steps to the bluff his tent was built on, over-looking the majority of the site. Noel watched him move, watched the nervous energy, popping like a spark-plug, under his skin. His heel tapped idly against the stone, arms coming up to cross over his chest. He wanted to ask him something, Noel deduced. He hadn’t talked to Hope without Serah there to buffer between them before. There wasn’t much that Hope could ask that Serah couldn’t answer, or that Noel wouldn’t prefer she answer for him.

“So… you met her, right? Lightning? In Valhalla?”

Noel nodded, eyes narrowing. They’d gone over this already. Hope nodded to himself, an affirmation of what he already knew, before going on.

“Was she okay, do you think?”

“Depends on your definition,” Noel said, smiling wryly. “If swinging steel and swirling through the air qualifies as ‘okay,’ then she was perfect.”

“Sounds about right,” Hope chuckled, but it was a thin sound before he sighed, an unnamable exhaustion sloughing off his shoulders. “Of all the impossible things that have happened and are happening, this seems the most impossible. Waiting to see your friends again. Wondering if you ever will.”

Noel dropped his gaze down to the ground, muttering a quiet, “Yeah.”

Silence was an old friend. It had been a while since Noel last greeted it. Beneath the grinding gears of the Historia Crux and all the roars of the monsters, far and in-between, he hadn’t entertained its company in a while.

He didn’t miss it.

“How do you keep yourself from getting sick worrying about it?” Hope asked, and Noel was grateful for the interruption of the silence.

“Focus on the goal?” Noel said, uncertain if that truly qualified as an answer. “Especially if that goal ends up helping those friends. And trusting that your comrades know what they’re doing. I don’t know too much about your friends. Serah’s only told me a little bit. But if Lightning was any example to go by, I don’t think you have to worry too much.”

“Yeah, I suppose not… Honestly, it feels like so much time has passed since the last time I saw any of them. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m starting to forget them.”

Another beat of quiet. Noel searched the ground again for something to say. This was the longest conversation he’d sustained with Hope. And within personal territory, no less. Hope yawned then, pressing his fingers to the corners of his eyes.

“Wow, I really must be boring. I think I’m putting _myself_ to sleep,” he chuckled.

“Then, you should rest.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to take a break, too? When was the last time you slept?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m better when I’m awake, anyway.” Noel jerked his head back into the tent. “Get some sleep. It’ll knock out the nerves. Promise.”

“That you’re professional hypothesis?” Hope teased.

“I’m a thousand years your senior. Life experience.”

Hope laughed.

Things got easier after that. Noel still felt like an outsider – and he didn’t think that it had anything to do with the people he was around – but he felt less like a stranger. The more he and Hope talked – and they started talking much more, step by step, little by little – the more he recognized himself in the man that had so intimidated him the first time they met.

He saw a man that was just as out of his element as he was. Hope was just much better at hiding it. Because he was surrounded by the instruments of his trade. He plugged himself into data and digits, acted as the nucleus of the entire operation, and in that role, he could forget the wrongness of the whole thing. How disparate the planes of time were. How inconsistent history broke apart around him. How far away from the people he cared about he was.

Noel understood him more each time he saw him. Sometimes it was the Yaschas Massif. Sometimes it was Academia. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was even talking to Hope. Sometimes he didn’t know which projection of history was true. But even if the anomalies he met were mere shades of the man that was meant to exist, they didn’t feel like aliens to the original. They felt like progressions. If Hope followed one thread of feeling, he could be this. The seed of each version was coded into the man Noel was cultivating into a friend. Each phantom of followed feeling based on truth.

Which was why the question he was posed with, much farther down the timeline, at a date he wasn’t sure was meant to exist or not, was… startling. Because there was no warning to it. There was no version of Hope that he’d met that was a realization of this hidden desire. Noel’s first instinct was to think the man a dangerous anomaly. Something written far out of any of the histories he’d visited. What could be more lethal than this question, after all?

“Can I kiss you?”

Noel did the first thing that all his years of hunting had bred him to do when faced with a wild animal. Freeze. Stop moving in case it didn’t already see you. Wait for it to pass if it didn’t. But Hope did see him. His eyes were wide and forced steady. There was a tiny tremble around the irises that indicated his struggle to keep them straight forward. Pinned on Noel as if he would run away the second he blinked.

…Which wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

“What? W-Why?” Noel asked in lieu of doing anything so cowardly.

Hope blinked – Noel did not run away. Fair features flushed a pale pink, the question catching him by surprise and putting him on the spot. Noel felt a strange little twinge in his chest as he watched him recover.

“O-Oh, um… I dunno, I just… We’ve been talking a lot and I’ve, um, really been enjoying your company. More and more lately, I think about you when you’re not around. A lot. And, uh, maybe I misunderstood, I’m sorry, I thought that those last few times we spoke… it felt like we were flirting, so…”

Noel stared. “Flirting.” His brow creased as he thought back to any particular instance where they might have. He didn’t even know _how_ to flirt. He thought himself lucky that he even knew what flirting was. There were vague concepts of romance in his tribe that whispered through his memory from when he was a child. But by the time he was a man, most of his people were gone. And the concept of flirting got smashed beneath that terrible need to survive and keep the only other two people around him alive.

“I, uh… I’m sorry,” Noel said, scratching the back of his neck as he tried to think. “I don’t think I meant to… N-Not that you’re not worth flirting with or anything! I, uh, dunno. I don’t think I’ve actually ever, intentionally, flirted with anyone before. Is accidental flirting a thing?”

Hope laughed and Noel was grateful. It made the weight of this apparent error feel a little less heavy.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry. I, uh, probably shouldn’t have asked like that anyway.”

“No, no, it’s fine! I prefer the bluntness, honestly.”

It was Hope’s turn to freeze, and Noel was afraid that he’d said something wrong again. Another awkward accident. Hope pursed his lips, the fine lines of his brow coming together as he looked at Noel. He looked like he was on the verge of saying something important, but his brow smoothed again and his lips lifted in a smile.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He parted with a small wave and Noel was left standing there to contemplate the meaning behind the parting words. Because there had to be some meaning behind them. There was meaning behind everything Hope did. He’d spoken with such a delicate smile, too. Much like the smiles that Noel was only _just_ remembering he’d fixed him with during a few of their previous conversation.

Noel felt his face warm and smiled to himself. Oh. So that was what flirting looked like. He’d have to keep that in mind, too.


End file.
